Confirmation
by Eevee
Summary: Bikky smokes his first cigarette when he is fourteen.


Bikky smokes his first cigarette when he is fourteen, sitting on the curb of some parking lot outside a hospital with a name that later will escape him. He's sitting there because Dee is sitting there, and Dee is sitting there because he wants to smoke. For all the skills Bikky might or might not concede him, his unbroken chain-smoking is a strange hypnosis that makes it seem like time is standing still. New York City is as busy as always around them, and he can't see the moon for the tall buildings and the streetlight they are sitting beneath.

Logically, Bikky knows that the night is going to pass into morning like it always does and that New York City does not care if one man more or less is dead by then. When the skyline is growing lighter, the city will face the morning like any other. Kids will go to school, stores will open their doors, office buildings will light up and the trains will be filled up with commuters. The clocks will tick on, the tide will fall, the rush hour traffic jam will disperse, and the hospital will see enough people coming and going for counting to be futile. But he's not wearing a watch, and there aren't any cars coming or leaving at this time of the night. Above the restless streets of New York, the only evidence of time passing is the number of cigarette butts littered at Dee's feet.

The smoking is just another reason why Bikky never liked Dee. Bikky has hated the smell of cigarette smoke for as long as he can remember, and Dee always seemed to forget that Ryo did not approve, despite the demonstrative lack of ashtrays in his apartment. Between the company of Dee's cigarettes and no company at all, however, the choice was easy. Dee is hardly making an effort to make Bikky feel better, but Bikky isn't a kid any longer, and appreciates it. He was right there when his dad bled to death on their kitchen floor, and no matter how much he hates thinking about it, he knows that he would hate thinking about how he spent this night sitting alone in a deserted, windowless hospital corridor even more. So he followed Dee outside and didn't say anything about the smell, taking some sort of comfort in knowing that at least he's not alone in being a helpless bystander this time around.

He tries not to think about how his life will be after, tries not to imagine how it would be if Ryo wasn't there to yell at him and give him curfews and take away the money he made on shoplifting beer for gradeschoolers. He is not succesful; he wonders if this means he is going to have to be an adult. For all that he hates Ryo's attempts at keeping him on some sort of leash, he realized, sometime tonight, that living without it would mean a lot more than not being treated like a kid. For all that he might have griped about Ryo's stupid ideas about "family", the life that will come with being all alone, all over, is not one of freedom. It isn't the chance to finally do whatever he wants to - it is terrifyingly empty, blank and uncertain.

He sits like that on the parking lot, batting around thoughts about a future that seems surreal although years of hanging aroung the detectives of the 27th prestinct makes at least part of him recognize it as quite probable right now, and Dee lights another cigarette. From the far side of the lot comes the distant sound of a car door slamming shut, followed by the sound of an engine starting. Thirteen cigarette butts after they sat down, the world jerks back into motion when a red Toyota leaves the hospital. Eleven seconds later, the parking lot is as quiet as ever, but the smell of Dee's Marlboros is suddenly as impossible to ignore as the logical fact that time passes even without watches to prove it.

In a moment that is slightly more surreal than the rest of the night, Bikky thinks 'to hell with it all' and decides that instead of telling Dee to spare his senses, it will probably be easier to live with it if he can get used to the way tobacco taste. "Hey," he says, and then he repeats it because neither he nor Dee heard him the first time.

Dee exhales smoke and turns to look at him.

"Can I have one?"

Dee gives him a flat look.

"Do you know what Ryo - " and he stops.

And Bikky doesn't argue that for all they know, it might no longer matter whether or not Ryo would flay Dee for actively encouraging Bikky to take up his unhealthy habbits, and Dee doesn't finish that sentence. He hands Bikky two cigarettes and the lighter, instead. Bikky puts one of the cigarettes in his mouth and tries three times before he manages to get the lighter to work. He switches hand and breathes in so his mouth fills with warm smoke.

Carole has more than once informed him that smoking stops being cool once you're out of junior high. Bikky doesn't know when Dee started smoking, but knowing Dee, he can't have been much older than Bikky is now. In a brutal second, it dawns on him that he is about to seal his fate to addiction and cancer threats and having his hair and every item of clothing he owns reeking of tobacco smoke. He lowers his hand and stares at the glowing tip of the cigarette, and realize that it no longer matter quite so much whether the doctors will tell them "yes" or "no" when they go back in there. Something has shifted, and Bikky has made peace with the knowledge that the choice between putting out the cigarette or not is all his.

He makes his second drag a determined one.


End file.
